Articles Tagged "Bjorn Lomborg"

My cover story for The Sunday Times (the biggest UK broadsheet with 1m copies).

Getting smarter with global warming:

"As I fly into a snow-bound Britain, I realise that you might be asking where global warming has gone as you shiver in the coldest March for 50 years and wonder what you will do if gas has to be rationed. I have been involved in the climate debate for more than a decade, but I am still amazed at how wrong we get it. Let us try to restart our thinking on global warming.

Yes, global warming is real and mostly man-made, but our policies have failed predictably and spectacularly.

A new study shows that 40% of the warming we have seen the past 50 years can be ascribed not to man-made global warming but the so-called Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).

This 50-80 year cycle is well-documented over the past 353 years.

Look at the top graph of global temperatures. The blue line indicates the long swings -- steep temperature increase 1910-1940, slight cooling till 1975, another steep increase from 1975-2005 and now a standstill.

You can't make this up :) An Australian company just sought (but failed) to get approval for a carbon credit plan, killing hundreds of thousands of Australia's 750,000 camels from helicopters. Because of the camels' belching and farting, they emit methane, and if shot, they would reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.

Camel-Slaughter Plan Rejected for Australian Carbon Credits - washpost.bloomberg.com - A plan to give carbon credits for slaughtering camels, curbing emissions coming from their flatulence, was rejected by an Australian government committee.

Today, Sir David Attenborough remarkably said that "humans are a plague on the earth" (http://bit.ly/10NotMj). He should have done a bit of fact checking first.

Sounding like this is the year 1800 and he just picked up a copy of Malthus, he predicts we're going to run out of resources, starvation will increase and we're simply running out of space.

Well, most of our resources are getting more plentiful, not less because of innovation (see my Foreign Affairs piece http://fam.ag/LfIoMl).

Starvation, though still a huge issues, has actually declined dramatically: in 1950, 53% of all people in the developing world starved, whereas it has dropped to about 13% today. (Remember, a significant part of the reason for higher food prices and more hunger is that we grow biofuels on an area one-quarter of France.)

SCARE stories have been an integral part of the global warming narrative for a long time.

Back in 1997, Al Gore told us that global warming was making the El Niño winds stronger and more severe. That has not happened. Greenpeace and many others have told us for years that we will see more violent hurricanes. In fact, over the past six years, global hurricane energy has dropped to its lowest level since the 1970s, while the United States has had the longest absence of severe hurricanes ever.

It is understandable that pundits, worried about global warming and frustrated with the near-absence of political solutions, see exaggeration as a way to garner attention. The problem is that when these scare stories are shown to be wrong, people become less willing to listen to reasonable arguments about global warming. Indeed, scepticism about global warming has gone up as false alarms have become increasingly high-pitched.

Moreover, by casting every problem as mainly caused by global warming, the solution almost automatically becomes cutting CO² emissions, though this often is the slowest, costliest way to achieve the least good.

I don't agree with all of what Bjorn Lomberg has to say, as he assumes there is such a thing as "man made" global warming, but apart from that he has some valid ideas.......here is a transcript from this Interview, I'm glad to say he agrees that there has been no recent warming...The temperatures haven’t risen for the last 16 years:

Bjørn Lomborg, a guru of climate change research, shares his take on global warming and what stands behind it

Please, tell me, do you think that there really is a connection between the growing number of natural disasters and the global warming process as such?

Well, first of all global warming is real, it is men-made and it is an important problem. But the way it is often being portrayed as the cause of the vast majority of extreme weather incidents is simply unfounded. If we look at a lot of the catastrophes that we’ve seen over the last years and that have been very well published, they are by far mostly driven by social factors. If you look for instance at hurricanes – the reason why we have ever more damage from hurricanes is because many more people live on coastlines and typically with more and more wealth. If you actually correct that, and we have the best data for the US, you’ll see no change in incidents whatsoever. And there is purely radical reason to believe that by the end of the century we will probably see slightly stronger hurricanes, probably also slightly fewer, but this is really not what we are seeing right now. What we are seeing right is that we have increasing social vulnerability because of more people and more stuff.

The world has spent two decades developing policies to combat global warming -- and we have little to show for it.

Whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney finds himself working from the Oval Office over the next four years, he will face the problem of tackling global warming without breaking the bank. He will have to realize that ignoring the problem will not make it go away — but will also have to accept that the policies of the past 20 years have not worked.

Those policies, like the pledges to reduce carbon emissions at innumerable global conferences — from Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to Kyoto in 1998 to Durban in 2011 — have failed to tackle global warming. The total efforts of the last 20 years of climate policy has likely reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent, or about 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Even if this decrease were attained for 100 years, it would reduce the temperature increase at the end of the century by an immeasurable one-hundredth of a degree Fahrenheit. The seas would rise about one-twentieth of one inch less.

These policies have also failed because they rely on very expensive but unreliable green technologies like wind turbines and solar panels. It is estimated that had the Kyoto Protocol been implemented as agreed, it would have cost $180 billion a year. Implementing the European Union’s climate policy for 2020 — which calls for a 20 percent reduction below 1990 levels in CO2 emissions and reaches for 20 percent of total energy from renewables, both of which are hard and hence expensive – will cost about $250 billion a year. In a weak economy, such price tags make combating climate change an increasingly difficult political sell — just look at the collapse of the Spanish solar subsidies, the substantial cutbacks of subsidies in Germany, and the possible expiration of the U.S. wind tax credit by the end of the year.

Many have worried about the destruction of hurricane Sandy. But most well-meaning commentators – for instance, clearly Bloomberg and his magazine – have almost exclusively focused on the climate aspect and suggested climate policies as the most important part of the solution. The truth is that climate policies will only do very little, very expensively and very slowly. Can’t we do better for future generations?

The very explicit cover this week of Bloomberg Businessweek

Look at sea level rise (which gave by far the biggest damage in New York). If the EU carry through its climate plan (the 20–20–20 plan) it will cost about $250 billion a year (1.3% of GDP) for the rest of the century. The reduction in sea level rise will be about 0.9cm by the year 2100. (A third of an inch.) If the US made a similar plan (politically very unrealistic), the price and the effect would probably be on a similar scale. The total cost would be about $500 billion annually, and lower sea level rise by just 2 cm by the end of the century – less than an inch.

Consider an extremely unrealistic scenario: even if we almost immediately could get the entire world – including the Chinese and Indians – on board for drastic carbon cuts, and even if we would suck CO2 out of the atmosphere towards the end of the century, we could only reduce sea level rise between 18 and 45cm (7-18in) by the end of the century. The cost would be about 40,000 billion dollars towards the end of the century (about 13% of global GDP) but probably 10–100 times higher, because the cost calculations assume that politicians will choose the most rational policies across hundred years and across all continents, which all climate policies so far have disproven. (In reality we of course can't spend more than 100%, which means that we will in fact be reducing CO2 much less)

The new climate-change study getting all the headlines is deliberately misleading. Too bad so many in the media got fooled.

September 26 was a triumph for public relations. An organization called DARA launched a report called "Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2nd Edition. A Guide to the Cold Calculus of a Hot Planet." The study, sponsored by 20 countries, projected some astoundingly large impacts from climate change, both on the number of deaths and the economic impacts. The report has produced a media heyday for climate alarmism, but is a house of cards built on dubious analysis and erroneous claims.

News headlines around the world reflected the study's projections about deaths and costs. A much-quoted Reuters story, posted here by the Huffington Post, cautioned: "Climate Change Deaths Could Total 100 Million By 2030 If World Fails To Act." Businessweek's headline warned: "Climate Change Reducing Global GDP by $1.2 Trillion."

Nearly all the media coverage also portrayed the study uncritically, and with the assumption that these bad outcomes were crucially dependent on us not tackling climate change. (Another headline: "If world doesn't act on climate, 100 million will die by 2030.") Bloomberg News's story helpfully stressed that if climate change remains, unchecked the cost will escalate by 2030 to 3.2 percent of GDP or about $6.7 trillion annually.